A small victory for transparency – public disclosure for NRU

February 6, 2009 — David Jackson

I was heartened to read in the Ottawa Citizen today that AECL has agreed to voluntary public disclosure on its website of any future incidents at NRU. This is a small but worthwhile step in the direction of more transparency and honesty in dealing with the public.

It was what they should have been doing all along for good public relations as recommended in my last post. Maybe somebody there actually reads this blog but on the other hand it was the obvious thing to do and I’m sure eventually they would have come up with it on their own.

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2 Responses to “A small victory for transparency – public disclosure for NRU”

This is a slippery slope. What about events at power reactors? Whatever AECL and the CNSC says the media will not believe it. The media has to be educated. Put on a one day Radiation 101 at Chalk River for the media.

I just got back from the CNSC meeting on the December non-incident at Chalk River. AECL got chewed out by one of the commissioners for still not putting out all the details and for not explaining the slides and graphs it did put out.

Turns out that there’s actually a lot of info on AECL’s website, but you have to look for it.

Which begs the question about the edu-mu-cation of the media. Probably the best way to deal with this kind of story (leaks at a reactor) is to “borify” them with a litany of facts and figures.

But what about sexifying the debate? Nuclear outworks all of the fashionable non-solutions to climate change (wind, solar, etc.) combined, but there’s a real danger that the non-solutions are about to get more funding. They are the Trojan Horse for the gas industry, so why not just say it?